Dating and Sorting Scanned Photos Which You Don't Know When They Were Taken

tehabe · Aug 4, 2021

I'm scanning a lot of old photos and next to the technical issues I'm running into the date issue, I have a film of slides which were taken in the 1960s but I don't know more, my father who took the photos don't know much either about when he shoot them.

Sadly, photo meta data don't allow dates like "maybe in the mid to late 1960s". So how do you solve this?

faberryman · Aug 4, 2021

Will the metadata field accept "1960s"?

Adrian Bacon · Aug 4, 2021

tehabe said:
I'm scanning a lot of old photos and next to the technical issues I'm running into the date issue, I have a film of slides which were taken in the 1960s but I don't know more, my father who took the photos don't know much either about when he shoot them.

Sadly, photo meta data don't allow dates like "maybe in the mid to late 1960s". So how do you solve this?

For the actual date in the metadata, I'd leave it at the date it was digitized, then use keywords or tags (which exif does allow) to indicate the approximate date the photo was taken.

MattKing · Aug 4, 2021

Some slide processors printed or embossed dates on the slide mounts, and with old slides those dates can be hard to see.
1960-early, 1960-mid, and 1960-late is something I've used.

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 4, 2021

When I posted my old scanned pictures in Flickr, I often use Circa... and the approximate year in the selector box. There's also Taken during... prefix you can use for the photo. Then there's a second section where you enter the date uploaded.

Dating and Sorting Scanned Photos Which You Don't Know When They Were Taken

tehabe

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